Leland Hobbs

Leland Stanford Hobbs (4 February 1892-6 March 1966) was a Major-General of the US Army who commanded the US 30th Infantry Division (the Virginia and Carolina Old Hickories) during World War II.

Biography
Leland Stanford Hobbs was born on 4 February 1892 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the United States. Raised in New Jersey, he graduated from West Point in June 1915 in the same class as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley ("the class the stars fell on"). Hobbs was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant of the US Army infantry and was sent to the US 12th Infantry Regiment in Nogales, Arizona. He later took part in the Pancho Villa Expedition to Mexico under General John J. Pershing, and was sent to France in World War I with the US 11th Infantry Division. His division saw no action, as the armistice was signed before they could fight against the German Empire. In 1937 he was appointed the Chief-of-Staff of the US 3rd Army, following a few general staff assignments in the Interwar Years. In 1940 he was made the commanding officer of the US 3rd Infantry Regiment as a Colonel, and in July 1942 he was promoted to commander of the US 30th Infantry Division in Camp Blanding, Florida. On 11 June 1944 his division landed at Omaha Beach in northern France during World War II, and they secured the Vire-et-Taute Canal on 7 July 1944, while spearheading the 25 July Operation Cobra breakout from Normandy. His army later fought in the counterattack at Mortain, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Aachen, the last of which was the first German city to fall to the Allied Powers. After the war he led the US IX Corps in Japan as an occupying army, and he retired in 1953. He died in 1966 at the age of 74 at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington DC.